Category: past summers

  • Tight

      I’m cheap. It’s not that I want to be; rather, it’s that I’ve never had heaps of money, and I do so like stuff. The marriage of these realities means that I live for a bargain. Don’t get me wrong: I inherently have expensive tastes, and I would love to be flush enough to…

  • Happiness Is a Red Negligee

              Two summers ago, we entered a merciful holding pattern… metaphorically. For nobody got on an airplane. And nobody died. Nobody sprang a mutated version of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” evening on us. Instead, we took a quick trip to Lincoln, Nebraska, meeting my sister there for a few days…

  • Eternal Youth

          By the summer of 2004, we had sold one of our two houses (no double mortgages), churned out all the kids we intended to (no notion of breeding a full soccer team), and come to acceptance of our family’s quirks (plenty of dysfunction, but no crazy Aunt Millicent tied to a chair…

  • Emergence

    Four years ago this summer, in 2003, I started to think I might be an adult. I was 36. Sure, I had been married for a few years, I’d been teaching at the college level for more than a decade, I’d been a homeowner several times over, and I had two kids. But up until…

  • Family, Edited

    I went to a baby shower last weekend. Although it got a little woo-woo during the programmed portion of the event (a candle was lit in the center of the circle; we all held onto a long hank of yarn, one that apparently connected all our pulsing womanhoods into one larger life force; there were…

  • Supersized Settling, With a Side of Fries

    “Supersized Settling, With a Side of Fries” In the car culture of middle America, the first months of a baby’s life see the infant toted everywhere, from grocery store to doctor’s office to library, all whilst strapped into a car seat with a handle; during this time, the most gratifying interaction a parent has with…

  • Norris Geyser Basin

    Eight years ago, Groom asked, “So, will you marry me?” The answer, of course, was “Yee-haw, Moondoggie!” And later that night, I got pregnant. …which means that seven years ago this summer, I was the hormonal, exhausted, dazed caregiver of a three-month-old baby. I spent that summer not in Eastern Europe or Iceland, but on…

  • Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy

    “Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy” To recap: in a series of summers as I hovered around the age of 30, I found gainful employment, emotional healing, and the constancy of my own two feet. And then came the summer of perspective. July of 1999 saw me savaging my credit cards, beating them and…

  • Chicken for One

    “Chicken for One” Eleven summers ago, I got a job that paid a liveable wage. Ten summers ago, I got over a broken heart. And nine summers ago, I got confident. That summer, I was back in love–with a new feller, someone intriguing and exciting yet damnably inscrutable and taciturn–ready to embark on the extended…

  • “Busted in Ballyvaughn” Eleven years ago, I started to turn my life around economically. However, my romantic life was still facing the wrong direction. It took another year for the About Face of the Heart to take place, for me to realize that I’d spent the bulk of my twenties in a relationship that, while…